In the field of retail merchandising, increasing use has been made in recent years of hook and pegboard assemblies for retail display of relatively small merchandise items. Such assemblies typically consist of an upright pegboard to which are attached a number of merchandise hooks or pegs. Retail merchandise items are hung from the hooks, typically by way of a merchandise package having a hole punched at its top. The front package on each hook may be easily removed by a customer for examination or purchase, whereupon the next merchandise item on the hook is visibly displayed.
Point-of-purchase merchandise fixtures are fixtures designed to hold and display retail merchandise on a self-serve basis in retail stores or other enclosed shopping areas. They are designed to encourage and facilitate selection of items by customers without assistance from sales personnel. The items displayed on these fixtures are customarily purchased when the customer is finished shopping and leaves the store through a cash register terminal.
The hook and pegboard assembly is one of several types of point-of-purchase merchandising fixtures commonly available. Other such fixtures include racks, bins and shelves for holding and displaying merchandise items. The retail sales industry has increasingly relied on the hook and pegboard assembly in preference over the other types of fixtures for several reasons.
First, the hook and pegboard assembly presents a neatly arrayed assortment of items. Like items may be grouped together on individual hooks, such that only a single item of each type is displayed at a time. The hooks maintain the merchandise items in an orderly display, yet a customer may nevertheless easily remove an item for examination or purchase and just as easily replace the item without disturbing the display. This is in sharp contrast to bins or shelves. A shelf or bin may be neatly stocked initially, but handling of the goods by customers invariably results in rapid rearrangement of the ordered goods to produce a disordered and unattractive display.
The hook and pegboard display assembly is particularly welladapted to the currently widespread practice of deterring shoplifting by enclosing small retail items in bulky packages. This practice typically takes the form of packaging a small item on a relatively large sheet of cardboard and covering it with a vacuum-formed clear plastic shell, thereby rendering the item bulky and difficult to conceal by a potential shoplifter. Such packages are difficult to display in a pleasing manner in a bin or on a shelf, but can be conveniently displayed on a hook by punching a hole near the upper edge of the cardboard backing and hanging the package from the hook. The hook and pegboard display also further enhances a secondary use of the cardboard backing as an advertising medium whereby printed advertisements may be placed on the front of the cardboard backing around the packaged item. Hanging the items from hooks enables all of the items to be displayed in an upright orientation and facing in the same direction, thus keeping the advertising messages on the cardboard backings properly positioned for easy reading by customers.
The hook and pegboard assembly is also particularly well adapted to displaying goods enclosed in bags, since the bag may be hung by a punched hole in its upper sealed margin. As with the packages described above, the bag itself may be used as an advertising medium as well as a merchandise container, and may be readily displayed in a readable manner on the hook and pegboard assembly.
The hook and pegboard assembly is also preferred because it permits a larger product line to be displayed in a limited retail space than do other types of fixtures. Individual hooks may be arranged as close together on the pegboard as the sizes of the displayed packages will allow, thereby permitting a relatively high density of different product items to be individually displayed. The particular arrangement of the hooks on the pegboard may also be tailored to best display in an attractive manner items of assorted sizes and shapes. This flexibility permits more efficient use of space than can be attained with racks, shelves or bins. Also, the number of each type of item displayed may be kept small by using inventory cards placed on the hook behind the last package of the hook to facilitate rapid restocking of the items when they are exhausted. This further improves on the efficient use of the available space. No other display device offers such an efficient use of valuable retail space.
Despite the above-mentioned advantages of the conventional hook and pegboard display assembly, certain problems have become apparent, the alleviation of which is the object of the present invention. First, the use of literally millions of display hooks protruding towards the passageways and aisles of retail stores has resulted in a disconcertingly large number of personal accidents and injuries. The exposed hooks tend to snag clothing. Much more seriously, the tend to injure persons who fall or who are pushed onto a display, as well as persons who may merely stoop towards a display and fail to see a protruding hook. Children have been the primary victims of these accidents. A rather alarming number of eye injuries and other serious facial puncture injuries have provoked widespread concern within the retailing industry for the safety of these displays. It has been recognized within the industry that a primary reason for the surprising number of eye injuries is the ease with which the hooks may be inadvertently overlooked when they are partially empty. Since they are made of steel wire rods and protrude directly towards the aisles and other customer areas of a store, they are difficult to see from an end-on view after a few or all of the merchandise items have been removed. The hooks are thus prone to causing accidents as customers stoop towards a display or as children play in the aisles. It is also recognized that the difficulty in seeing the wire rod end-on is further aggravated by the background of a myriad of small round holes in the typical pegboard backing.
The concern for safety has prompted the introduction of a number of safety improvements which have proved helpful but not altogether dispositive of the problem. For example, some hooks have been provided with rounded ball ends to make their tips less dangerous. Protective wire guards have also been provided on some displays to enclose the hooks and their merchandise. The protective guards, although quite efficient from a safety standpoint, interfere with casual handling and removal of merchandise items by customers and are also difficult to install where a large number of hooks are densely positioned on a pegboard. The rounded ball ends have likewise not proved entirely satisfactory by themselves because they must be necessarily kept rather small to allow removal of the merchandise, yet small ball ends have proved almost as dangerous as the original wire hook ends. Although these devices and other similar safety features have represented improvements in the safety of hook and pegboard displays, it has been seen desirable to continue to seek ways to even further improve on the safety of these displays.
A commercial problem with hook and pegboard displays is the decrease in sales due to decreasing visibility of remaining merchandise items after the front packages have been removed from a hook. Especially in a large array of merchandise items hung from hooks, the removal of several packages from the front end of a hook leaves the remaining packages at the back end of the hook partially hidden from view. It is well recognized in the retailing industry that this has a direct negative effect on sales of the remaining items. This also gives an unkempt appearance to the overall display, and sales of all items in the display are thereby also negatively affected somewhat. Decreased visibility is particularly a problem with respect to hooks positioned either higher or lower than average eye level. In these cases, the remaining packages at the back of the hook become almost fully obscured, and the problem becomes similar to the well-known problem in the retail industry of selling goods rom a floorlevel shelf.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a hook and pegboard merchandise display device which maintains suspended merchandise items in a neat, orderly array wherein removal of some of the merchandise items does not diminish the visibility of remaining merchandise items on a hook.
It is also a purpose of the present invention to provide a hook and pegboard merchandise display device which offers improved safety characteristics.